DON’T BE VAGUE …

Is it a libel if one describes a person as gay when he or she is not so? If it is indeed libellous, why would it be so? Homosexuality is not against the law in Britain, so long as it is between consenting adults in private. In what would consist the libel? Is being gay a stigma in the eyes of the law, even though it is not illegal?

And are there degrees of liability in such a case? Would a false accusation of homosexuality still be held to be defamatory per se or would the plaintiff now need to show that it was defamatory per quod, that is to say that actual damage was caused, whether directly financial or indirectly financial – in the sense of adversely affecting the plaintiff’s career? These are shifting sands and no juridical toe has been dipped in them since the end of 2005 when Robbie Williams was awarded substantial damages against The People newspaper for carrying an allegation that he was secretly gay and that his then imminent autobiography would perpetrate a deception upon the public by accounting him heterosexual.

Clearly an important ingredient in the matter is the direct accusation or veiled suggestion within the supposed libel that the subject is a liar. This is a further fraught area. Is it defamatory to accuse someone falsely of being a liar? In the world of politics, mendacity is taken very seriously. In neither house are you permitted to call a fellow member a liar or to imply as much. Alan Clark famously described himself as having been “economical with the actualité”, a thrust that he would have made against a fellow politician at his peril.

All these questions arise in the light of today’s lead story in The Daily Telegraph, headed “Cabinet minister may act over false claims of gay affairs”. You can read the piece at

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7968924/Cabinet-minister-may-act-over-false-claims-of-gay-affairs.html

The very headline raises a number of questions. Is something that “may” happen legitimately a news item? Shouldn’t the newspaper take a more even-handed line with the story, for instance by placing the word “false” in quotation marks? To state falsity baldly implies that the paper accepts without question that the claims are false. Putting the word in quotes would more properly and appropriately indicate that the cabinet minister in question holds that they are false. But if the paper does not believe that there is any fire under the smoke, why is it running the story at all, let alone as its lead?

Coyly, the paper never hints at the identity of the cabinet minister. Such fastidiousness is unusual in the press, including The Telegraph itself which, in repeating rumours in the past while denying or questioning them, has not been backward in naming those touched by the rumours. Simultaneously, the paper today carries the news, shared with all its fellows, of the statement by the junior minister Crispin Blunt that he has separated from his wife and has “decided to come to terms with his homosexuality”. On another page, the paper repeats the “gay rumours” concerning the MI6 operative whose body was found earlier in the week. These rumours it roundly denounces as “smears”, seemingly picking up the term from the dead man’s family. I will not have been alone, immediately the story first broke, in suspecting that we would sooner or later hear of a real or imagined gay angle to this bizarre killing.

The cabinet minister story has been circulating on the internet and it is the work of but a moment to identify the subject, if one couldn’t already guess. It is William Hague, the Foreign Secretary. In truthfully asserting that he is the subject of rumour, I do not, I think, commit any offence against him. I am not crediting the rumour. It is not for me to judge whether it be true or false.


William & Ffion Hague

But William Hague is a grown-up and a politician in the public eye. Indeed, he has been in the public eye for more of his life than any of his peers – 33 of his 49 years – because he famously scored a hit with the Tory Party and the then leader Margaret Thatcher when he addressed the party conference at the tender age of 16. So it is reasonable to examine his behaviour and to ask whether he might have avoided the possibility that rumours of homosexuality might attach themselves to him.

Hague married Ffion Jenkins shortly before he himself became leader of the Tory Party. He was then 36, young to be leader, old to marry. Bachelor MPs inevitably provoke questions. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Gordon Brown was asked by then host Sue Lawley: “are you gay?” He said “no”. He didn’t appear to take umbrage. Nothing more was made of it. Brown finally married at 49 but I have never heard the whisper of a suggestion that he was gay or thought to be gay by anyone. (Someone once told me, laughably yet earnestly, that Tony Blair was gay; not a belief shared by many, I suggest).


Thatcher with her 16 year-old fan

If he wanted to avoid any suspicion about his sexuality, William Hague went about it in a decidedly cavalier fashion. At Oxford, he was befriended by Alan Duncan – they both became President of the Union, a customary rung on the ladder to a political career. They subsequently shared a Battersea flat and both became management trainees at Shell Oil. Duncan then swanned off to make his fortune in business. Duly achieved, some of the fortune was ploughed into a swanky house convenient for the Commons and Hague became Duncan’s lodger at the rent of a monthly case of champagne. The street in which they played house, they may perhaps have enjoyed telling people, was Gayfere Street.

Hague became an MP at a by-election in 1989 and Duncan joined him on the government benches in 1992. When John Major stood down after the 1997 election defeat, it was Duncan who persuaded Hague to stand in his own right rather than as number two to Michael Howard. Hague somewhat unexpectedly won the ballot. But his time leading the party was unhappy, partly because Duncan was initially his advisor and gave lousy advice. Hague had made Duncan his parliamentary political secretary, a post that had never existed before and has not been reinstated since Duncan stepped down from it and from being Hague’s press advisor.


Akan Duncan with his civil partner James Dunseath

After the Tory failure at the 2001 election, Hague was replaced as leader by Iain Duncan Smith. It was only a few months later that Alan Duncan publicly acknowledged for the first time what everyone at Westminster and on Fleet Street had always known: that he was gay. What wasn’t remarked at the time - though it certainly occurred to me – was that the reason why Duncan had passed ten years in the house before coming clean was that it might have occasioned questions about his relationship with Hague. Now that Hague was yesterday’s man, it was of no interest to anyone.

But Hague is now Foreign Secretary and questions about him appear to bear renewed pith. What has sparked this particular flurry is the appearance in the Daily Mail of pictures of Hague with one of his aides, a 25 year-old called Chris Myers. Ostensibly, the paper was running the picture sequence in order to mock Hague's reversion to the baseball cap that did his image such damage when he was first Tory leader (he is clutching the cap in the picture I reproduce below). But of course the real interest lies in his choice of strolling companion. Myers has recently become Hague’s third special advisor. The government has undertaken to cull the number of special advisors, but no Labour foreign secretary required more than two such.


The man of the people down the pub

To describe Hague’s appearance with Myers as “informal” would hardly be to overstate. Admittedly these photographs were taken last year, when Hague was only shadow Foreign Secretary. On the other hand, it illustrates that the pair were at the very least on matey terms before Myers’ elevation.

Now I must make clear that I neither make nor intend any innuendo about this relationship. All I submit is that Hague has been reckless with his image, knowing as he must do that the press will put two and two together and make 180 if given half the chance. If he wants these rumours to be stilled, he needs to govern his behaviour. And, if I were he, I wouldn’t submit myself to media interview for a good long time. Because if someone asks Sue Lawley’s question, he will have to say a blunt, simple and entirely truthful “no”. Anything else would bring him down. That is why the per quod action is pertinent to any libel suit he may decide to pursue. But of course he won’t be resorting to the courts. The precedents for such action are not encouraging.


With aide Chris Myers